Knowing the radio environment around a cellular base station (BS) may help improve the performance of a BS. For example, user handover, radio resource management, link adaptation and channel estimation may be improved by knowing the radio environment, or signal characterizations of received signals from various locations near the BS.
Some BSs may be located in rural areas with a generally flat topography where received signals from user equipment (UE) located at various positions may have similar received signal characteristics. Other BSs may be located in an urban area with clusters of buildings of various shapes and sizes along with open areas, such as parks or bodies of water. In this type of radio environment, received signals from UEs at various locations may have very different signal characteristics, or channel representations.
Drive tests may be used to obtain a radio environment maps for various BSs. However, these drive tests may be costly. Further, a radio environment map may consist of one dimensional scalars, such as received power or signal-to-noise (SNR) values for particular locations. These one dimension map representations may not be good enough to capture the uniqueness of radio characteristics at a particular location.